Hamas: Israeli threat to invade all for show

Israeli soldiers prepare their ammunition Monday in a staging area near the Israel-Gaza Strip border in southern Israel. The Palestinian civilian death toll mounts as Israel pursues Gaza Strip militants who have been firing rockets into Israel.
Israeli soldiers prepare their ammunition Monday in a staging area near the Israel-Gaza Strip border in southern Israel. The Palestinian civilian death toll mounts as Israel pursues Gaza Strip militants who have been firing rockets into Israel.

— The top leader of Hamas dared Israel on Monday to launch a ground invasion of Gaza and dismissed diplomatic efforts to broker a cease-fire in the 6-day-old conflict, as the Israeli military conducted a new wave of deadly airstrikes on the besieged Palestinian enclave, including a second hit on a 15-story building that houses media outlets. A volley of rockets fired from Gaza into southern Israel included one that hit a vacant school.

Speaking at a news conference in Cairo, where the diplomatic efforts were under way, the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, suggested that the Israeli infantry mobilization on the border with Gaza was a bluff on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

“If you wanted to launch it, you would have done it,” Meshal told reporters. He accused Israel of using the invasion threat as an attempt to “dictate its own terms and force us into silence.”

Rejecting Israel’s contention that Hamas had precipitated the conflict, Meshal said the burden was on the Israelis. “The demand of the people of Gaza is meeting their legitimate demands - for Israel to be restrained from its aggression, assassinations and invasions and for the siege over Gaza to be ended,” he said.

photo

AP

Israelis hide in a concrete tube Monday during a rocket attack from Gaza, in Nitzan, southern Israel.

Netanyahu met with top ministers Monday evening, and Israeli media said they discussed the next steps in the Gaza conflict, including the possibility of a truce. Israeli officials declined to comment on those reports.

The Hamas Health Ministry said Monday evening that a total of 111 people had been killed since Wednesday morning, when Israeli airstrikes began after months of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. A spokesman for the Israeli military said she believed that a majority of these were militants, though it is difficult to know because Hamas’ own fighting brigade and the other factional groups are secretive.

The Hamas ministry said the dead included at least 26 children, 10 women and 12 men older than 50, who were presumably not involved in combat. Of the remainder, at least 36 are known militants. Hamas officials said more than 860 have been wounded, 260 of them children, 140 of them women and 55 men older than 50.

Three people have been killed so far in Israel, all civilians, in a rocket strike that hit an apartment house in the southern Israeli town of Kiryat Malachi on Thursday morning. The Israelis have said at least 79 Israelis have been wounded and Gaza rockets have reached as far north as Tel Aviv.

The latest Gaza casualties - 38 people reported killed since midnight local time - included Palestinians killed in strikes by warplanes, a drone attack on two men on a motorcycle, and a father and two toddler sons in their bombed northern Gaza home, witnesses and medical sources said. Another Israeli drone attack killed the driver of a taxi hired by journalists and displaying “Press” signs, although it was not clear which journalists had hired it, Palestinian officials said.

On Sunday, Israeli forces attacked two buildings housing local broadcasters and production companies used by foreign outlets. Israeli officials denied targeting journalists, but on Monday Israeli forces again blasted the Al Sharouk block, a multi-use building where many local broadcasters, as well as Sky News of Britain and the channel Al Arabiya, had offices.

And in central Gaza, four militants were killed in two separate strikes. In the air raid early today, Israeli aircraft struck the Islamic National Bank used to pay Hamas employees.

Israel says its onslaught is designed to stop Hamas from launching the rockets, but, after an apparent lull overnight, more missiles hurtled toward targets in Israel on Monday, some of them intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. Of five rockets fired on Monday at the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, four were intercepted,but one smashed through the concrete roof at the entrance to an empty school. There were no reports of casualties. Other rockets rained on areas along the border with Gaza.

Later a second salvo struck Ashkelon. Several rockets were intercepted, but one crashed down onto a house, causing damage but no casualties.

Israeli officials said 135 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel on Monday, of which 42 were intercepted by Iron Dome. Most of the others landed in open areas.

On Sunday, Palestinian rocket launches totaled nearly 100 by nightfall, including two that soared toward Tel Aviv but were knocked out of the sky by Israeli defenses.

In a statement Monday, the Israel Defense Forces said overnight targets included “underground rocket launchers, terror tunnels, training bases, Hamas command posts and weapon storage facilities.” But news reports said the strikes flattened two houses belonging to a single family, killing two children and two adults and injuring 42 people, and a shrapnel burst from another attack killed one child and wounded others living near the rubble of the former national-security compound.

Lebanese military experts on Monday dismantled two Katyusha rockets that were equipped with timers and ready to fire at Israel, a senior Lebanese security official said. The rockets were found about 2.5 miles away from the Lebanon-Israel border.

The latest exchanges offered a grim backdrop to Egyptian led cease-fire efforts that have so far proved inconclusive. The U.N. secretary-general, Ban Kimoon, was set to join the effort in Cairo.

From behind the scenes, the Obama administration pressed its Arab and European allies to persuade militants to cease firing rockets.

President Barack Obama called Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi and Netanyahu to discuss ways to halt the violence. Obama underscored that the onus was on Hamas to stop shooting rockets at Israel.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke by telephone with the foreign ministers of France, Qatar and Turkey. She also sought to advance efforts to de-escalate tensions in calls with Ban and Egypt’s prime minister.

Russia’s U.N. ambassador on Monday expressed frustration that the Security Council has remained silent about the escalating violence.

Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Morocco circulated a proposed press statement last Thursday but foot-dragging by one council member meant it “is still bogged down.”

Churkin said, “To me, it looks like a filibuster attempt.”

He would not tell reporters outside the Security Council on Monday which nation was blocking the press statement, which must be adopted unanimously. But he said anyone guessing it was the United States would be “a connoisseur” of Security Council politics.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel a terrorist state and said he does not trust the U.N. because it lacks a Muslim voice.

Some delegates listening to Erdogan speak at an Islamic conference in Istanbul on Monday applauded his comments.

Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai,the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said there had been a reduction of up to 40 percent in rocket fire from Gaza and that Israeli forces had launched 40 attacks on tunnels between Egypt and Gaza.

He said six rocket-launching teams and two men on motorcycles were hit, while the Israeli forces continued to intercept Palestinian radio signals to urge Gaza residents to steer clear of activists.

In the Israeli strike on Sunday morning, it took emergency workers and a Caterpillar digger more than an hour to reveal the extent of the devastation under the two-story home of Jamal Dalu, a shop owner. Dalu was at the market when the blast wiped out nearly his entire family: His sister, wife, two daughters, daughter-in-law and four grandchildren ages 2 to 6 all perished under the rubble, along with two neighbors, an 18-yearold and his grandmother.

Ismail Haniya, the prime minister of the militant Hamas faction that rules Gaza, condemned the attack as a “massacre” that “exceeded all expectations.”

Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said it was “still looking into” the Sunday afternoon strike on the Dalu home, which she described as an accident. She said the target had been a man “in charge of rocket launching” from the neighborhood, but it was unclear whether that man even lived nearby.

The Dalu family were buried Monday after an intense, chaotic two-hour funeral procession that quickly became a Hamas rally clearly aimed at least in part at sending a strong message of defiance through the scores of journalists in the crowd. Thousands thronged the streets following the bodies from the destroyed Dalu home to the Esraa Mosque and then to the Sheikh Radwan cemetery, shouting slogans of resistance as fighters fired rifles into the air and waved the green Hamas flags as well as the white ones of the armed Al Qassam Brigades.

At the destroyed Dalu family home, a man climbed atop the pile of rubble where a dozen photographers had positioned themselves and hoisted the body of one of the four slain children into the air several times, as though a totem. At the mosque, the eulogy was disrupted by the sound of a missile launched toward Israel from nearby. And at the cemetery, a Qassam leader named Mosheer Al Masri spoke not about the victims but about the enemy.

“Tel Aviv, which we hit, will be hit over and over until you stop your crimes against our civilians,” Masri said. “Your threats will not scare us, they will just make us stronger and more resistant.”

“Our message to Netanyahu is that we will defeat you like we defeated your ancestors,” he added. “We still have so much in our pockets and we will show you if we have to.”Information for this article was contributed by Fares Akram, Jodi Rudoren, Alan Cowell, Isabel Kershner, Ethan Bronner, Myra Noveck, Irit Pazner Garshowitz, Rina Castelnuovo, Peter Baker and David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times; by Karin Laub, Ibrahim Barzak, Mohammed Daraghmeh Dalia Nammari, Peter Spielmann, Julie Pace and Zeina Karam of The Associated Press; and by Selcan Hacaoglu of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/20/2012

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